How do you even start to make sense of Johnny Cash? He made a LOT of records over 40 years, covering a lot territory.
One argument against this collection would be redundancy. Besides everything else, this makes somewhere north of a dozen Johnny Cash box sets. There are few recording artists more deserving of multiple box set treatments, but all the repackaging over the years means that most people have most of the more important material.
On the other hand, this box might be the best place to start if you don't own any Johnny Cash records. [What are you non-Johnny owning people anyway, commies?] These four CDs certainly have all the hits. It does not include any of the American Recordings material, but the other 90% of his career is well represented. It's got the Sun records where he made his name, and the decades of Columbia recordings.
As many great records as he made over so many years, it seems like there must be stuff missing- but danged if I can think what it would be. I don't particularly have any big new insights to share about his best known hits, but "I Walk the Line" and "Ring of Fire" and the "Folsom Prison Blues" etc are all here.
I was particularly glad to see the 1964 hit "The Ballad of Ira Hayes," which for some reason gets left off a lot of compilations, despite being a top ten country hit. It tells the story of Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian who was one of the soldiers raising the flag at Iwo Jima in the famous photo, who died drunk in a ditch in 1955. Somedays this is my favorite Johnny Cash song. He really gets his Old Testament mojo working. It comes out sounding like Ira's death was God's punishment for selling out to the white man. Them Carter women do some ghostly stuff with the vocal harmonies.
Despite being a big hit, a lot of country radio stations banned the song. In fairness, this DOES seem like an awfully harsh, even "anti-American" sentiment for commercial country radio, or it would seem like such coming from anyone but Cash. This resulted in a classic Cash gesture. Johnny took out a full-page ad in Billboard that read, "‘The Ballad of Ira Hayes’ is strong medicine. So is Rochester-Harlem-Birmingham and Vietnam. Where’s your guts?"
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